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Forbes
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Karma: The Dark World' Review (PS5): Beauty And The East
Karma: The Dark World is one of the most beautiful indie titles of 2025. You might not know what the hell is going on, or understand why you're doing what you need to, but this trippy ride consistently rewards your eyes, even though your head is spinning. As the debut title for independent Chinese developer Pollard Studio, Karma: The Dark World is the latest in a long line of non-combat, slow-paced, first-person thriller games in the vein of Still Wakes the Deep. It draws inspiration from Twin Peaks, Alan Wake, Silent Hill, and anything Hideo Kojima had his hands on, as well as George Orwell — entirely unsurprising, given its setting. Its trailer gives only a taste of the absolute madness you'll experience over its 10-to-12-hour running time — and its sumptuous art direction, under the watchful eye of Ke Yang — and it's unlike anything you'll have ever seen before, even though Karma's influences are very clear. You take on the role of Daniel McGovern, a secret police agent in an alternate universe version of East Germany, which has been taken over by the all-seeing, all-knowing corporate dictator, Leviathan. Luckily, you're on their side, working as a member of ROAM, a technocratic uber-Stasi whose interrogators can dive into the minds and memories of suspects. You start proceedings on a hospital bed, with no memory of who you are, and a trio of plugs sticking into your arm, which gives you the impression you're dressed like Psycho Mantis. Still, that's the least of your problems; you gaze out of the window to see cars and birds flicker in and out of reality, plus a dead body that doesn't. Karma: The Dark World combines its initial game calibration with the perfect introduction to a quietly malicious world. It's 1984. You're scared and alone, faced with weird tests that check your audio settings, as you play tapes which calmly recite passages about 'trampled humans' and their 'dying cries'. You calibrate your field of vision in an oddly sanitised room. Then you walk into a room filled with baths, in which 'potted,' mannequin-like humans sit in dirt. Less (more?) fortunate cadavers are piled in a corner. The worst type of mudbath. Pollard Studio Soon, you meet a disabled man who promises answers, but not before he puts you into a chair and plunges you into the past. Via a quick flashback to 1968, in which you're 'onboarded' to the world by Leviathan agents acting on behalf of MOTHER — this world's Big Brother character — you begin to explore memories that constantly blur the lines between cold, boring reality and manic, Lynchian delirium. Karma: The Dark World is a slow game, both in its exposition and its occasionally frustrating slow walking speed. However, this world demands you pay attention to the minutiae, both to solve its puzzles and to slowly understand the sheer depths of its repressive world. While it has horror characteristics, Karma is much more of a dystopian thriller; if you're worried about gore or jump scares, don't be. It has two or three 'shock' moments, but none of them quite connect to lift you out of your seat, or force a shower and change of clothing. Mannequins. Of course there are mannequins. Pollard Studio That's not to say you won't feel sick to your stomach, because you never trust the world around you, even when it looks like a simple office or quiet street. Much like Still Wakes the Deep, even the most solid-looking walls can disappear in the blink of an eye. Much like its setting, Karma: The Dark World is dripping with allegories and metaphors, to the point you don't ever feel like you know or necessarily understand the story. You might perceive this as its main weakness, mainly because it doesn't come close to giving you any real answers for hours, but it soon becomes its core strength. Apt, really, given how Orwellian it is. You wonder if those people with TVs for heads are an allegory, or really do have CRTs on their necks. memories are selective in the minds of people you explore, so is that ten-foot-tall monster really a hulking brute, or a symbol of something else? And how exactly are you smoking that, anyway? Pollard Studio Still, specific issues remain consistently clear, including the helpless despair faced by both leading characters — most notably, Sean Mehndez — and broader society, which you watch fall under the ever-tightening grip of slavery by a faceless dictator that issues heartbreaking decrees and forces unfortunates into drug-fuelled bureaucracy. Read into it what you will, but you'll be reminded of many bêtes noires of the 21st century: authoritarianism, AI, surveillance, and more. For all its storytelling and artistic strengths, Karma: The Dark World offers a handful of annoyances along the way. The first is the control system on PS5, which feels poorly optimized; 'sprinting' is bound to L1, your inventory is on Square, and you open doors and drawers with the right stick, but only by holding the interact button (X, but also R2?). Combined with an imprecise reticle, this can be really annoying, though luckily the slow pace of the game doesn't mean you need accuracy under pressure. Meanwhile, the voice acting is genuinely strong, but the script can often let the talent down. It's worst with player-character Daniel, who often responds to deep and meaningful exposition as if he's deaf, forcing him to lash out like a confused child and repeat the same queries and concerns that have already been answered — and in a frustratingly child-like tone. Ah great, more mannequins. Pollard Studio Critically, the most disappointing element of Karma: The Dark World is that it doesn't make the most of its East German setting. The GDR is arguably the most fascinating failed state in history, but I can't recall one explicit mention of it throughout the game. Pollard Studio adopts a catch-all 'concrete totalitarianism' approach, but does away with iconography, art styles, and even the German language. For history fans, it amputates a huge selling point of the game, making it feel like it could be set in any European country of that era. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder For all these minor faults, Karma: The Dark World should be on the list for any fan of slow-burn thrillers like Layers of Fear, Soma, or Observer. Puzzles, in particular, are very rewarding, and areas in which you find them are carefully restricted so you stay focused on fewer moving parts or clues. A particular late-game room with four clocks was a real air-puncher when I finally figured it out — few games can be so consistently satisfying. What's more, Pollard Studio should be celebrated for creating one of the most stunning games of 2025. While its technical performance doesn't match the heights of Kojima or Remedy's most recent work, Karma: The Dark World consistently hits the mindbending heights of its artistic vision. I'm still piecing the story and its meanings together over a week since completing the game, and that's entirely because certain scenes and ideas have lived rent-free in my head since I put the controller down. For $25, Karma: The Dark World really does need to be played to be understood — or not understood, as the case often proves — but its weirdness, beauty, and strange approach to puzzles are truly rewarding. Much like Fear the Spotlight, the ending isn't the end, either, and even if you did platinum it, you'll still feel like you've missed something. Maybe that's the point.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
3 Video Games You May Have Missed in March
At least one end-of-year awards contender was released in March, when a studio that focuses on cooperative video games brought Split Fiction to the masses. Our critic called it 'a manic mash-up of science fiction and fantasy' with 'many spectacles that make you pick your eyes up off the floor.' Those looking for single-player experiences could turn to Assassin's Creed Shadows, which follows two stories of vengeance in a vibrant feudal Japan; the cozy game Wanderstop, where a former warrior manages a tea cafe in a meditation on burnout; and Atomfall, which spins an alternative history around the worst nuclear event in British annals. Here are three other games you may have missed this month: Karma: The Dark World The brilliant Karma: The Dark World is one of the most aggressively disturbing horror games released in some time. When the investigator Daniel McGovern wakes to an empty hospital room, his left arm is grossly black and bionic. After removing three tubes, he sees ebony ooze burbling out and screams, a little too emotional to be a government sleuth. This weirdly unpopulated hospital is only the beginning. Through extremely dim, maddening office mazes, it's discovered that McGovern's mission is to find and interrogate Sean Mehndez, a family man addled by constant work for the autocratic Leviathan corporation. He's also accused of robbery. Throughout 12 hours of gameplay, Karma's creators have taken many inspirations — including BioShock and 'Severance' — to the next level with creepily surreal and bizarrely utopian set pieces. Here, the looping terror of Guillermo del Toro's and Hideo Kojima's P.T., a playable teaser for an unreleased horror game, is made far more frightening. On one of McGovern's trips through the loop of rooms, mannequins of the Mehndez family sit around a TV that shows stock footage of unsettling threshers on farmland. On the following trip, answered phones spew puzzling words. And during the next, corpses are hanging on hooks, heads rolling off their bodies if you dare approach. Witnessing these things from a first-person point of view, I felt somewhat insane myself. I had to stop to clear my head several times, especially after visiting an office with a foreboding Christmas tree made of old computer monitors, a metaphor for Leviathan's religious zealotry. Signs that were hung as brutal reminders read 'OBEY.' Static Dobermans held obscure clues on paper. The company's workers, who sometimes have computer monitors as heads, are woeful, depressed and mentally drained from the steely autocracy for which they toil. They work themselves to the bone. When McGovern runs from a skeletal monster into a narrow, claustrophobic hallway with locked doors, the bony hands emitting from the goon's chest aren't as oppressive as the overall atmosphere. The beast is almost overkill. The real horrors here are the effects of the company's edicts, and the blue pills it purveys that play games with the mind but keep workers plodding through. It's even more affecting than the excellent Mouthwashing. Midway through, I stopped again because one of these dizzying rooms induced nausea. But I kept returning to investigate this potent mix of speculative and realist fiction, learning how democracy died, somehow feeling brainwashed as well. Expelled! Woe to the pupil who fakes an illness to get out of class at Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls. Should she be sent to the infirmary, she just might have to swallow a generous dose of cod liver oil to appease the suspicious spirit of the school nurse. And just how does that taste? 'Like a group of sardines died together in a tin, a hundred years ago, and this was all that they left behind.' Over the course of her very bad day, Verity Amersham, the heroine of Expelled!, will have to brave all manner of indignities beyond cod liver oil to avoid being kicked out of school. Her fate hangs in the balance because an injured classmate has claimed Verity pushed her out of an upper-story window. To clear her name and uncover the facts and the whys of the incident, Verity will have to use what little time she has before the end of the day to chat with the school's students, teachers and staff members to gain the leverage she needs to vanquish her rivals and burnish her social standing. Expelled! feels like a visual novel crossed with a roguelite game. Players are incentivized to relive Verity's school day several times because information gleaned in one playthrough carries over to the next, opening up new lines for investigation. The writing — a model of economy — is deliciously funny, and the graphic novel visuals are fetching. Expelled! mounts a magnificent charm offensive. Centum Creativity may often be perceived as something light and freeing, but creativity can also be a prison. It's a dilemma that the adventure game Centum works to explore. Taking place within the warped and disintegrating world of an abandoned video game, Centum opens in a stone prison cell. You can poke and prod at various objects, even sketch a grim companion onto the wall, but you cannot escape. Not until you step back a level, to the game's metatextual computer interface, and launch a hacked version of that same scenario. This lets you break free of the prison and into all sorts of new, strange, gorgeously illustrated environs. Centum uses its layers of abstract visuals and narrative to wrestle with the challenges and responsibilities of creating art. What if the thing you built in an attempt to reach others winds up hurting them instead? What if you inadvertently pack your trauma and your wounds into your work, leaving them as traps for an unsuspecting audience? These questions manifest in a fractured and mystifying world of puzzles and one-off retro computer games that recall the early decades of indie game development. An OutRun-like game lets you race to flee a suffocating city; a top-down pixel art maze reflects the dead ends of the creator's depressed mind. Little makes sense at first glance, but the discordant pieces of Centum's narrative leave a successful impression of the pain and frustration inherent to all acts of creation.
